A List

Okay, I seriously need to get some stuff done today. Here is my list:

• mail recent ebay sales (I made...um...about $15 on this batch! Whooo!)
  
• spend AT LEAST 4 hours at the library. I need to get started thinking about this conference paper I have to write, and look into some more texts for one of my courses. The annoying thing is that I'll have to go home for lunch--or perhaps I should bite the bullet and pack a lunch? Or a snack, minimum? Then I can really hole up in there. Luckily it's going to be oppressively hot again today, and the library is air conditioned (unlike my apartment), so perhaps I'll feel less of an incentive to leave than I usually do.
• wash my breakfast dishes
• download "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Come on Eileen" and maybe have a little dance party in my living room
• make a pile of stuff to sell/give away via the grad student listserv
• blog about that cheese I bought yesterday--Sisyphys and Hilaire demand a description! Which is forthcoming, I promise!

Okay. It's so, so hot already. Living on the top floor of a well-insulated house with small windows does have its disadvantages....

The current state of affairs

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that I wrote my Highly Successful Toast in the car between the wedding and the reception. No one can accuse me of over-preparing! Even if I am already thinking through my lectures for the fall!

I have returned to my apartment, and the subletter left it in...okay condition. It's tidy, and he washed the sheets and stuff, but the bathroom was not in very good shape. In the last 2.5 hours, however, I have cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, washed the bathmat, made the bed, unpacked, put away groceries, and straightened up all the things that were slightly misplaced in the last two weeks (yes, I'm very uptight about my living space. That's just one of the things that makes me such a pleasure to live with).

It's extremely hot. My apartment is roasting. Once my laundry is done, I'm seriously considering stripping down to underwear.

Not sure I feel like cooking, either. It might be a beer and cheese and fruit kind of night. Beer, cheese, fruit, and TV.

Speaking of which, I bought an $18 piece of cheese today. It's an Epossies. Anyone who likes cheese must eat this cheese! It is delicious. So very delicious. I had it last week at a beer and cheese tasting I got to attend for free, and it was splendiferous. So when I was in the grocery store today, I considered buying it, rejected the notion, and then thought: Hey! My dad just gave me some money for my birthday. All of that money is going to go into necessities. But perhaps $18 of it should go into a piece of cheese?

And yes! It did!

Of course, because it was so expensive, I might postpone eating it. Which will eventually mean that I will have spent $18 for a piece of cheese that I never got around to eating.

Or perhaps I will eat some of it tonight?

My Brother's Fabulous Wedding

I'm back! And my brother's wedding was, indeed, fabulous. As this was the first time that I myself was actually in a wedding (I'm 31 and no bridesmaid's dresses--surely this is some kind of record?), I'm pleased to add that I didn't screw anything up, either. No small feat, given that it was a Catholic service and my family is not Catholic. As the maid of honor, I had a lot of sitting, standing, walking this way, standing here, facing that way, holding hands with the priest, embracing the best man, etc. etc. to do, and I spent fully half the ceremony worrying that I would forget when I needed to re-collect the bouquets. Fortunately the priest, who is naturally rather experienced with such ceremonies, muttered stage directions to us pretty much the whole time. So it went off without a hitch, and my little brother is married! And I have a splendid sister-in-law!

But, as is usually the case, it was the reception that truly made the wedding. First of all, the weather was perfect. Low seventies, sunny, very little wind, and clear clear clear. The reception was outdoors, in a beautiful spot on a hill beside a river, and behind the river were low mountains; the setting was glorious and the climate cooperative. It was a biggish wedding, with about 180 people in attendance (most of them on the bride's side), but (wisely) the couple had decided to dispense with most of the Traditional Reception Activities in favor of something much more their style. So, after the (brief) introduction of the wedding party, the bride and groom danced their first dance to a song performed by my dad and stepmother, who are excellent musicians and sounded great. Then there was an open dance party and much drinking and eating before the toasts--one of which I made. Yes, almost as big a milestone as my brother's getting married was this, My First Toast. People laughed when I wanted them to, so I was pleased. And here's a picture of me giving my toast (it's silhouetted, so I can post it). Note the admonishing finger:

The truly fabulous part was the second half of the reception, though. My brother in particular is very musical, and so are a lot of their friends, so they basically opened up the microphone and dance floor to various performances for the rest of the night. There was Irish step-dancing, an African dance, some kind of Irish fertility play (or something), and folk/rock numbers, including covers of a Tom Waits song and James' "Laid". My brother and his wife also performed a bit, since Brother plays guitar (among other things) and SIL sings. And, for the grand finale, my dad and my mom's cousin played some music the Mustang Sally genre, finally joined by my step-mother on vocals and my brother on guitar. Here's a picture of them playing (faces blacked out;* from left to right, we've got my cousin, my brother, my dad, and my stepmom).

Oh, and they served a huge stack of pizzas a couple of hours after the real dinner.

It was great--entertaining and moving and just plain fun. SIL's family rocks, too, so it was nice to hang out with them a bit. And now I'm back in BoyfriendCity, waiting for my subletter to leave my apartment (tomorrow!), and recovering from the excitement--as well as a cold I seem to have picked up along the way. Luckily it didn't hit me full-force until yesterday, when all of the work was done. Or most of it; we still had to clean up from Friday's rehearsal dinner. But now that's done, too, and I'm so so tired...with so much Homer left to read....

*I mention this just in case you thought they naturally had big rectangles for heads. Oh, unnecessary verbiage!

Gone for a bit

I'm off to my mom's for all the Brother's Wedding Hoopla. Probably won't blog until next week as I won't have my laptop with me and am loath to blog on my mom's computer--you know, for security reasons. Right?

Plus I'm going to be pulling weeds for the next 72 hours in preparation for the rehearsal dinner, and I expect my hands to be a withered mass of blisters. So, no typing.

See you next week!

Summer Reading

Ah, summer. I feel like it's almost over already...which it isn't...but there's so much to do and so little that I've DONE....

For the last few days, I've been reading like crazy (by which I mean, about 3 hours a day--but sometimes 4! I swear!) for this one class I have to teach in the fall. Now I'm a medievalist, as you know, and I've been hired pretty much as a generalist (I'm the new "British Literature" person at VerySLAC). But this one course doesn't even fit into BritLit. Now I figure I can describe it, because it's a pretty common course--it covers things like, oh, Virgil and Homer and Dante. Dante, yes, he's medieval (if not British). But Homer? Virgil? Oh, and Ovid? Sophocles? Those guys? Not so much.

And this is SO not my field. I had to read The Odyssey in the ninth grade, and I've read Oedipus Rex and Antigone at various points in my education, but that's it. So this month I read The Aeneid, and I'm currently working my way through The Iliad.

While I'm finding this material a little on the overwhelming side, I'm actually glad that I'm going to be teaching it. This is the kind of stuff that I have long felt I ought to read and know well, but that I never had the incentive to read and know well. And having to teach something? It kinda forces you to be on at least speaking terms with a text, right? So this is all a very good thing for me.

On the other hand, I can't come up with a syllabus that doesn't have us reading just a ridiculous amount of stuff every week, and that's kind of scary. In the process of reading the first 14 books of The Iliad, however, I've become convinced that certain sections of the text can be, er, skimmed. I'm not skimming now, because I need to ascertain what does and does not require one's full attention, but I might use the skimming policy as a means of packing the whole poem into like 2 weeks. (You know, assign books 1-6 but tell them to just "skim" 2 and 5, or whatever.) It's just...well, there's an awful lot of battle scenes, you know? My apologies to any classicists out there, but I find that my mind sort of wanders when confronted with stanza after stanza of "X hurled his spear at Y, son of Z, riveting his bosom through the nipple, and the blood poured out, red Trojan blood to water the battlefield. And M slew H, son of K, tearing neatly through both his nipples, and F saw this, and wept, crying out...." Etc.

(Okay I made that example up, obviously, but have you noticed how many references there are to (male) nipples in this book? At least, in Fagles' translation? It's kind of weird. And yes, that's pretty much all I'm getting out of the battle scenes: Nipples!)

A Way Out

So I've reached a kind of a decision.

The decision is this. If, in two or three years or so (see, it's only "kind of" a decision at this point), the academic profession is not permitting me to live the kind of life that I want to live, I am allowed to leave it and pursue something else. And not--importantly--to feel like I have failed.

Sometimes I simply marvel at people who get to live wherever they want (with their partners, near their families and/or friends) and find work. I'm not desperate yet, and I can wait a couple more years to live with my boyfriend and maybe start a family. But the thought of doing the wandering-scholar thing for more than a few years, and always struggling with visits and the question of when we'll finally be able to be together--well, that thought is discouraging. So I need to decide now that there is a way out, that I can get another job and still have a good life, even if I never end up taking that route.

(Caveat: This doesn't mean that I'm buying into the notion that I, The Woman in our couple, is the only one who might have to compromise. I am fortunate to have a partner who feels pretty much the same way about his career; he actually (partially) left academia in order to have more control over his professional future. He's still somewhat limited in where he'll be able to live, but basically he just needs to be in or very close to some kind of major urban center. And I know that he's willing to move for me. So it's not that I'm coming to terms with the idea that I might have to abandon my career for his, but rather that there's something comforting in remembering that there are other things I might like to do, and that it is not worth sacrificing the goodness in my life in order to VAP around the country indefinitely.)

I'm not in a pessimistic mood, or anything. I actually feel good about my chances on the market over the next few years, and I believe that I will get a decent job in a liveable location before too long. (Delusion? Hope is necessary.) But it's important for me to remember that this career is a choice, and that that choice can be unmade if I want it to be. It makes me happy. It reminds me that my life is chosen, and that it's mine.

Reflections on a Favorite Book, or, The Dangerous Lives of Poets

I leave in a few minutes for the boyfriend's city, and my house is ready(ish) for my sublettor (I accidentally used the clean towel I'd left him, but Oh Well; I was clean at the time). I've been accomplishing many small tasks this week, and am feeling good about that:

• I have selected an apartment
• I have read the first in the long list of books I need to teach this fall
• I have finished revising my article, and resubmitted it
• I have vacuumed and done the laundry.

Etc.

This morning I finished rereading a book that I really loved when I first read it 10 years ago, and am happy to report that I still really love it. It's a little known, out-of-print novel by James Ramsey Ullman called The Day on Fire. You should read this book. It's long, but since when has that been a deterrent?

In brief, The Day on Fire is a fictionalized biography of the poet Rimbaud. From what I've been able to gather, not much is known of Rimbaud's life, but what we do know is pretty interesting: he wrote all of his poetry between the ages of about 15 and 19, he was Verlaine's lover for a time, and he travelled widely through Europe and Africa, mostly on foot. There's good material in there for a novel, and Ullman does a great job with it. I won't go heavily into the plot here. But one of the things I really like the most about the novel is how Ullman uses bits of Rimbaud's poetry to unify the whole story--which is, as I say, long, and involves a lot of different "sections" (e.g. Morel [the Rimbaud-figure] living with Druard [the Verlaine-figure]; Morel teaching in Switzerland; Morel the African gun-runner). The different segments of the story threaten to become disconnected, but Ullman invokes scraps of Rimbaud's own writings as refrains throughout the novel. So, for example, the lines, "The night alone, and the day on fire" are used to at various points to invoke literal heat (in Africa), the torture of Morel's hashish addiction, or the more figurative fire of his drive to write poetry.* These images accrue more and more meanings as the novel progresses, so that when they're used, a whole network of associations comes forward and reminds the reader of all the stages of the character's life.

[*That sounds rather lame as I've described it, but that' s only because I've got to go in a minute and don't have time to think of a better example.]

More personally, I find this book exciting. Not so much because of the story's action--though that's exciting, too, in its own way--but because Morel-Rimbaud is himself so rich and fascinating. The novel is long, and that's good. There's a lot to excavate. He's not a...nice person, to put it mildly, but in a strange way I find myself wanting to be him, as I read; through his poetry and his strange life he created a sort of otherworld, a bizarre and disturbing world of intense symbolic power. I'm glad that I've finally finished reading this book, because there are other things that I have to read, but I regret leaving that world behind.

Rimbaud, like so many poets, died young. He was 37, I think. Byron was 36, and the Scandinavian poet Edith Sodergran was 31. Why have so many poets died at such young ages? It's dangerous, to be a poet.